Article excerpt

From Sunday to Sunday, black Americans attend religious
services, pray and read religious materials more often than white
Americans, a group of university researchers say.

Researchers at three universities studied stacks of research
from over the past 20 years to come up with that report. Although
several studies have documented the importance of religion and
religious institutions in the lives of black Americans, little
research focused on racial differences in religious participation.
The new survey is published in the current issue of the Journal for
the Scientific Study of Religion.

Even allowing for factors such as income and regional
differences, researchers found blacks are more involved in their
churches and say religion is important in their lives, the journal
article reported.
The report did not surprise some African-American pastors in
the area, but it disturbed others.
"I can't deem if we are more religious than white Americans,
but African-Americans have had to seek Christ out of their need,
since our need has been so great," said the Rev. Dr. Sammie Jones,
pastor of Mount Zion Missionary Baptist Church on South Compton
Avenue. "God has always been the only place we could go for
consolation."
The study showed that as children both blacks and whites have
the same amount of religious education and have similar confidence
in organized religion. But the way they perceive their own interest
in religion differs. For example, in a 1978 survey, 30 percent of
blacks said they were very "religious minded," compared with 16
percent of whites. A 1986 Americans' Changing Lives study found 39
percent of black respondents read religious materials at least once
a week; 23 percent of white respondents said they read religious
materials that often. In the same study, 80 percent of blacks and
52 percent of whites said religion was very important.
"There is a real race effect here," said Robert Joseph Taylor
of the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan.
Taylor and Linda M. Chatters of the University of Michigan,
Rukmalie Jayakody of Pennsylvania State University and Jeffrey S.
Levin of Eastern Virginia Medical School examined six national
studies done between 1976 and 1987 at the Institute for Social
Research at Michigan and the annual General Social Surveys of 1972
to 1990, collected by the National Opinion Research Center at the
University of Chicago. …

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